Question 1

Why is my profit margin becoming thinner as we scale?

Accepted Answer

When you increase ad spend, it's common to discover your CPL goes up or your ROAS goes down. Here's why.

Increasing our ad spend means we are targeting a larger audience.

* This larger audience is higher up in the sales funnel, which means they aren't as ready to buy, which means they click on more ads and take longer to convert.
* This larger audience is dominated by the big players. Competitors with a lot of money have the wiggle room necessary to over-bid on keywords because they're determined to win the click, so competing with them brings our CPC up.
* The more we dominate the existing market, the less certain Google's algorithms will be when they show an ad. The algorithm is making educated guesses on when to try to go for the click, but when only a small portion of our audience is made up of low-hanging-fruit now the algorithm's guesswork becomes more fuzzy. We are bidding on less of a sure thing.
* We are beginning to add "brand awareness" strategies in order to try to warm up the larger market. For example, a display ad that targets a proactive (meaning not remarketed) audience won't get many clicks, it will only get views for the most part. Big companies do this (for example Pepsi might buy a billboard even though it's expensive and doesn't contribute directly to their CPL), and it's a long-term effort to try to boost us over the competition by gaining familiarity with our brand near the top of the funnel.

Question 2

How do I set up UTM Tracking?

Accepted Answer

This means you want to manually store data in your CRM platform which tells you where the contact record originated from.

In order to do this, you will have to set up hidden fields on your landing page, and you will select which words (aka parameters) to store (i.e. “source=google” and “campaign=branded”).

Once you determine those parameters, you (or your vendor) will enter into the appropriate campaigns or ad groups.

You can double check that the UTM settings are set up correctly by clicking on "ADS & EXTENSIONS", then click and "EDIT" on an ad and then click “TEST.”

Intro to UTM parameters training here: [https://youtu.be/RIL3HPA_Ddg]

Keep in mind: These UTM parameters aren't quite as good as Google at tracking folks with accuracy. It's simply a piece of text that's temporarily stored in the person' browser cache when they visit the site. If they come back to the site again with new parameters sent, then the browser's cache will be overwritten with the new parameters. If they come back to the site on a different device to convert, then the browser won't push the parameters into Shopify. If they delete their cache & cookies between their first site visit and the site visit that they convert on, then Shopify also wouldn't be able to include the parameters with the sale.

Google, on the other hand, is much better at tracking folks across devices and through any accidental cache deletions or overwritings. Google has people logged in on their phones, etc. etc.

But the UTM parameters should be close enough to accurate to get a quick gauge on what percentage of traffic is coming from where! You can also compare this data with your Google Analytics account in the Source/Medium section.

Question 3

What should my monthly budget be to start?

Accepted Answer

Generally, a $2,000 monthly startup ad budget allows us to gain enough data to make optimizations within the first month.

A budget that is too low doesn't offer enough data to see what’s working and what’s not.

On the other hand, exorbitant ad spend puts you at risk of overspending in areas that don't provide good results.

Our solution? We test every Google advertising channel (such as search, display, [GSP](https://selftaughtmarketing.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/what-is-gsp/), and Shopping) to see how each performs and influences other campaigns within the account.

Then, we reallocate ad spend to the higher-performing campaigns.

Question 4

What is the best ad copy strategy to use for search campaigns?

Accepted Answer

The recommended approach for best ad copy strategy is to use **2 Expanded Text Ads & 1 Responsive Search Ad**.

Every **search** campaign’s ad group has these 3 ads inside it.

The **expanded text ads** give a structured ecosystem to try out the **two sets of headlines/descriptions** you think will work the best, and then use the **RSA ad** to give you **insights into which ad copy is most effective**.

Effective copy can be a better **click rate** (which helps with the **quality score**) or a **better conversion rate**.

After there have been **100 clicks on the ads**, then you can begin making changes to **optimize the expanded text ads based on those insights**.

Question 5

How often do you make changes to a campaign?

Accepted Answer

A very high spending account may need daily or even hourly changes. For accounts with smaller budgets, there may not be as much maintenance involved.

Similarly, this depends on if we’re achieving our goals or not. If we are, we may make slower optimizations (to not deter the performance of the campaign). If we aren’t hitting our goals, we make more frequent optimizations until we start achieving them.

On average, we generally make changes in an account every 3-7 days (again, depending on how much activity the campaign gets and your specific goals).

Too many changes harbors an ecosystem where it’s hard to keep track of the outcomes; making changes too infrequently means competitors may outperform your campaign.

Question 6

How do you track phone calls (leads and sales)?

Accepted Answer

Tracking phone calls is incredibly important for accurate reporting. Any calls that come in from your campaign are recorded using a tool called [Call Tracking Metrics](https://www.calltrackingmetrics.com/).
 
Here’s how it works: 
 
First, a lead calls from an ad extension or from your website. 
 
When this happens, we can see some really useful data:  
What page of your website the individual was on when they called
What keyword they used to land on your website 
Which campaign generated that user 
Then, a member of our team manually scores every call. After listening to the call recording, we manually import the quality conversations and the associated data into Google Ads.
 
Most agencies use a time threshold to determine lead quality (for example, any call over 45 seconds is automatically recorded as a conversion); however, we ensure lead quality manually, which makes for far superior data.

Question 7

How did you create the estimated projections in the action plan?

Accepted Answer

Using tools such as [Google Keyword Planner](https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/), [iSpionage](https://www.ispionage.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIr8C8oKHy5wIVDfDACh11eAdMEAAYASAAEgJl5PD_BwE), [SpyFu](https://www.spyfu.com/), and [SEMrush](https://www.semrush.com/), we craft a keyword strategy.
 
Next, we: 
1. Add the total monthly impressions of those keywords
2. Divide that number by a standard 2% click-through rate
3. Multiply that by the keywords’ average cost-per-click
Finally, we produce results based on a 3%, 5%, and 10% conversion rate.
 
This will give you a total amount of monthly leads/sales and cost-per-lead/sale.

Question 8

How can we target competitors even more? / What is a Competitive Proactive Campaign?

Accepted Answer

Pick a few competitors (suggesting 1-6) and create a display or video campaign. Setup one ad set for each competitor. Then, build these 4 audiences within each ad set:

1. Custom affinity targeting the competitor's website
2. Custom affinity targeting the competitor's brand name
3. Custom intent targeting the competitor's website
4. Custom intent targeting the competitor's brand name

This is a highly segmented way to have an outbound campaign going to specific competitor's users/customers/leads. Affinity means it will target people who are frequently visiting that brand's site or associating themselves with that brand regularly. Intent means it will target the people who are actively researching or planning a purchase of that business.

The caveat with this campaign is, if your competitor is a SAAS product, frequent visitors of the site might be going there to login. So this means the ads will appear for the competitor's existing users. Because of this, it's recommended to test this campaign to make sure you aren't spending a ton of budget targeting primarily existing users -- and, if you are, make sure the ads feature a competitive advantage in an effort to get those users to make the switch.

Question 9

Why isn’t the Facebook remarketing campaign running?

Accepted Answer

It's common for Facebook remarketing campaigns to struggle to acquire a large enough audience in order to run. Facebook says their minimum audience size for a pixel-generated audience is 1000.

This means the Facebook pixel on your site needs to be able to match at least 1000 website visitors to Facebook users.

What factors into this?

**Match Rate** - Facebook doesn't reveal their average match rate (the rate at which website visitors can typically be matched up with Facebook users), and this likely varies greatly depending on the type of user who visits the site (do they tend to have Facebook accounts? Do they tend to reset their cache & cookies often?) as well as a number of other factors.

**Pixel Age** - The pixel is only able to see website visitors in real time, which means it can't see people who visited before the pixel was added to the site. So, if you've had the pixel on the site for 6 months then it will have 6 months worth of website visitors to try to mach to Facebook users (as long as the settings inside the Facebook ad account are set to look back 6 months, which is the maximum amount of time Facebook allows a pixel to look back).

So, the best thing to do is get the Facebook pixel onto the site early, make sure the settings inside FB pixel area are set to look back 6 months, and consider sending more people to the website with proactive (aka not remarketing) ad campaigns in order to populate that Facebook remarketing pixel audience.

Question 10

Why do I need a Branded Search Campaign/Why do I need to spend money when someone is searching for my brand name?

Accepted Answer

The common thought process is “why are we allocating budget in order for an ad to appear when someone is already searching for our brand? It seems like a waste of budget.”

Here’s why:

Don’t Leave the Hot Leads Exposed to Competitors: 
* You don’t want to leave the brand exposed to competitor campaigns. When a lead searches for the brand name, you don’t want a competitor ad to be the first thing they see (and you especially don’t want that lead to click on the competitor ad).

Gain Extra Data For Optimization Opportunities:
* Statistically it takes 2.5 clicks on average before someone is able to convert. Most people come back later. Without a branded campaign, you can see which keywords developed a conversion, but you can’t see how long it took them to convert and what path they took to come back (meaning did they Google your brand name or simply go back to your website, did they sign up for an email marketing campaign and then click on a link in an email, did they find a social media ad instead and click from there to convert, etc.). 
* This is because Google isn’t able to re-tie all the session data from the first interaction to the subsequent interactions. 
* If you set up a branded campaign, then you’re able to optimize fully because you can see which keywords have a shorter time lag, which have a heightened time decay, what is their top conversion path, etc. 
* Branded campaigns usually see about a 50% click-through rate and a 30% conversion rate, so they manage to catch a good chunk of the hot leads to help you see this data. 
* So, if you’re wondering how well the other campaigns are at driving traffic to make a return visit, you will need to raise the bid on the branded campaign.